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Mr. Bsag and I planned to go to London for the day yesterday. He had some prints in the Annual Open Exhibition at the Society of Graphic Fine Art, and was awarded a Highly Commended for one of them (yay!). He had to go and take down his work at the end of the show, so it was my last chance to see his work and the other exhibits in situ. Our plan was to get a cheap train to London on the Chiltern line, have a leisurely wander around the exhibition, get a few printing supplies from Intaglio, perhaps have a nice walk by the Thames, and top it off by having a cosy pint somewhere before coming home. It didn’t quite go according to plan.

Impediment 1: We thought we’d be able to get a cheap walk-up fare which would allow us to leave any time on a Saturday as we’ve done before, but Chiltern have changed their rules, so we had to book a ticket on line. Chiltern’s own booking page and thetrainline.co.uk showed completely different timetables. According to Chiltern, there were no cheap fares available, but thetrainline showed a few, leaving fairly late in the morning. Since we didn’t have much choice, we went for the later, cheaper train.

Impediment 2: We had to pick the tickets up from the station, but we’d had problems before with the dreaded self-service ticket machines which you’re supposed to use. However, it’s a little-known fact that even though the instructions say you can only pick up your tickets at one of a handful of stations with self-service machines, you can actually ask almost any ticket office to print the tickets for you if you give them the booking reference. So we’d timed our walk the local station to leave enough time to pick the tickets up there, get a train into the city, then walk to Moor Street Station in time to catch our train. Unfortunately, when we got to the local station, the ticket office was inexplicably closed. With a train approaching, we realised that we’d have to get the first train to leave enough time to pick up our tickets at Moor Street. The ticket machine had a long queue of similarly irritated passengers, of course, so we had to get a permit to travel and leap on the train.

Impediment 3: If you pick up your ticket to London from the local station, they include the cost of the local train journey in the price, so you don’t have to pay separately. But in our hurry to get the tickets booked, I’d forgotten to set the starting station as our local one. So when we came to join another long queue to exchange our permits to travel for tickets so we would be allowed to leave New Street Station, the dour railway official stubbornly pointed to the fact that our booking receipt said that the departure station was Moor Street, and we had to pay for two single tickets to New Street.

Impediment 4: With all this queuing and faffing about, we were getting rather close to the departure of our train. My heart sank as we ran into Moor Street Station and I saw the length of the queues at the only open ticket counter. I waited in line there for a minute or so, then decided to cut my losses and brave the self-service machines which had a shorter queue. When I got to the front, I inserted my debit card and entered the handy 20 digit booking reference (or so it seemed) on the touchscreen, whereupon the display announced smugly that it couldn’t read my card. I tried again, hoping that sliding the card in and out of the slot slowly might allow the idiot, mouth-breathing software time to read all the ones and zeros on the magnetic strip. It didn’t. I joined the queue for the other machine, fidgeting impatiently and looking at my watch. When I got to the front, I went through the whole procedure again, but this time, my card was recognised. Several geological eras later, our tickets had all been dispensed into the hopper, and I snatched them up and pelted across the concourse following Mr. B. We hared up the stairs, along the bridge and down the stairs, to see our train pulling out.

Impediment 5: The next train was 20 minutes later, but it was a stopping train and so would arrive 40 minutes or so after the one we’d planned to get, eating further into our already compressed day. Worse still, it was stopping at Wembley Stadium, where thousands of football fans were going to watch England play Kazakhstan. A large proportion of those fans seemed to be travelling from Moor Street. By some miracle, we both got a seat, and even though the fans collectively drank several lakes of Carling Black label, they were good-natured and no fights broke out. Still, we got slightly drunk on the lager fumes.

Impediment 6: London Marylebone Street! We got on the Bakerloo line southbound, and settled back thinking that the worst was over. At Oxford Circus, the train started making the ominous, escaping air sounds of a busted hydraulic system. Harried engineers bustled through the carriages with the hope that they might be able to plug something back in or slap some gaffer tape on something, but it was clear that the train was going nowhere, which meant that the Bakerloo line was going to be blocked. We jumped off the train, hurriedly consulted a tube map and decided to try our luck on the Victoria line to Stockwell, then change to the Northern line to get to Borough. It was a much longer journey, and there was a lot of running through corridors and up escalators, but we got there.

By this time, we had just 20 minutes or so to see the exhibition before the artists started taking down. We divided our efforts, and Mr. Bsag went to Intaglio to get his supplies, while I swept around the Menier Gallery. It was an excellent exhibition, so I was glad to have seen it, but it was a pretty lightning visit. Mr. Bsag joined me and we got busy with the bubblewrap and tape to pack up his prints to take home. It was a lovely evening, and it would have been really nice to wander along the river for a bit, but now we were convinced that we wanted to get a train before the final whistle at Wembley. We had a quick but very pleasant drink at a pub, then walked back to Borough tube station.

Impediment 7: As we got to the station, we could see that the shutters were closed. The lifts had stopped working, so they’d closed the station. We’d have to trek to London Bridge to get on the Northern Line. We stared. Mr. Bsag said, “You’ve got to be kidding”, though he added a few more words of a four-letter nature. Off we ran again, this time encumbered by three large, framed prints.

In the end we made it back to Marylebone in time for our train, and the rest of the journey went smoothly, but we ended up only having about two hours in London, and countless hours travelling.

On those occasions when my best laid plans gang aglae, my mood tends to go in one of two directions: I either get incredibly irritated and snappy or I see the whole situation as increasingly hilarious. I went in the latter direction this time, so in a rather perverse way, I quite enjoyed it. It was almost like finding yourself in a very bad film, subject to the whims of a poor writer who doesn’t know how to construct a believable plot. After each impediment I started to look forward to what this idiot would try to pass off as a plot twist next. “Broken-down tube train? Come on, at least throw some zombies in, then it would be funny, and you could go for the RomZomCom angle, even though it’s already been done by Edgar Wright.”

Mr. Bsag, it has to be said, was not of the same frame of mind, and regarded my amused, Buddha-like detachment with frank amazement, convinced that I’d finally gone off my rocker. My outlook might have had something to do with the fact that if I hadn’t gone to London, I would have been finishing off submitting a grant — something that I did this morning instead. It’s all relative, you see: it might have been a catalogue of mishaps, but it wasn’t wrestling with font sizes and page limits, and it at least gave me a good story to tell.

We spent a few days last week on holiday in North Devon, staying at Lynmouth. When we actually stopped to think about it, we realised that it was the first holiday (as opposed to work travel) we’d had in 3 years, and I certainly felt like we needed it! In the last few years, we seem to have always been too busy, had too little money or to have been doing things like moving house to make even a short break practical. But getting a change of scenery every now and again is important to recharge the batteries, so I was quite excited about our little trip.

We suspected that we would have dreadful weather, but in the end we were incredibly lucky. It was very windy on the coast, and that seemed to keep most of the showers at bay, or at least move them along quickly once they had started, so we didn’t get prolonged periods of rain. This was just as well, because we wanted to spend most of the time walking some of the coastal and moorland paths. Lynton and Lynmouth are really one town divided by an almost vertical cliff. There’s a rather nice Victorian water-powered cliff railway to take you between the two, or you can walk up the zig-zag paths which connect the two towns.

All I can say is that people who live in Lynton and Lynmouth must be very fit, and have very supple knee and ankle joints. Even with the zig-zags, the paths had sections that seemed to have slopes of about 40°, and required a curious, flexed-foot shuffle to walk up or down. This also applied to the coast path and a lot of the other footpaths we used for our walks. The area isn’t known as ‘Little Switzerland’ for nothing. Mr. Bsag is like a mountain goat, and climbs hills while walking or cycling with no perceptible effort. I, on the other hand, am clearly not geared correctly for hills, and while I can walk for miles on flat or undulating terrain, I puff and pant like a steam train on inclines. Despite that, we had some wonderful walks (with Mr. Bsag gently pushing me up some of the hills).

One of my favourite walks was along the River Lyn to Watersmeet (where two rivers meet, obviously). The river flows in a deep gorge which is thickly wooded with wonderful, lush ancient woodland. One benefit of all the rain we have had this summer is that the vegetation was even greener and more lush than it might have otherwise been. Every possible shade of green — from almost black, through vivid emerald, to sharp lime — was represented. Rain drops shone and sparkled on every surface making the whole wood glitter. Every rock and tree trunk was thickly covered in many species of moss, liverwort, lichen and fern. I couldn’t resist plunging my hand into a plump pad of moss, and found that it sank finger-deep into the cool, soft fronds. Deciduous woodland is one of my favourite habitats, and with a fast-flowing river too, it was just about perfect. I could have stayed for days in that green-brown dappled light, just looking around me and sighing happily. The photo above is of a section of the woodland, high on the valley side, entirely composed of oaks. It might well be very ancient, but the soil is so thin there, with rocks close to the surface that the oaks can’t get to their full size, and grow like ancient saplings, close together and corkscrewing towards the available light. Magical.

I travelled fairly light (for me, anyway) to Brazil, but one thing I was keen to take along was my iPhone. It turned out to be a very useful travel companion for entertainment (music, TV shows and books via Stanza) as well as a stopwatch, alarm¹, calculator, currency converter and various other useful widgets. We had no internet or mobile phone coverage at the site, but the connectivity was very useful during the interminable travelling. I found that with Airplane mode on, the battery life was great. I also took a Freeloader with me, which was brilliant for recharging on the go. The power supply at the place we stayed was not the most reliable, but there was certainly plenty of sun, so the solar panels of the Freeloader charged up its internal battery quickly. I could then recharge the iPhone (and my camera) up at my leisure. It works well in the UK too, though it takes longer to fully charge, but you can also charge it via USB from a laptop.

I lugged a paperback copy of War and Peace to Brazil (875g!), but if I had been a bit more alert, I would have noticed that it is available on Stanza, so I could have taken a weightless literary tome with me on my iPhone.

¹ I recommend ‘Piano Riff’ as an alarm tone. It brings a bluesy, dramatic start to the day, and you wake up composing “I woke up this morning [da-DA da-DUN]…” blues songs. It also goes well with howler monkeys. ↑

Watching wildlife is often the outcome of random encounters, and your luck never seems proportional to the time and effort you put in. Sometimes you lie silently on your belly on a freezing moor at dawn for hours and don’t see so much as a rabbit, but at other times, you stroll along whistling and almost trip over a rare and wonderful animal. We were quite fortunate on this trip and had a lot of the latter kinds of experiences, including seeing not one, but two, whole anacondas.

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: it’s not like in the film. They don’t suddenly lunge up out of the water and consume a boat and its occupants. They are fairly shy, and tend to lay low, quietly suffocating and swallowing smallish animals in private and out of the gaze of curious tourists. They also don’t need to eat very often, so catching them in the act is even less likely.

We saw anaconda 1 on a horse ride. We were gaily wandering through a shallow lake on horseback, when one of the guides jumped off his horse, and started excitedly poking about in the rushes. He’d seen an anaconda which was in the process of constricting around a caiman and eating it. You might think that jumping into the water next to a snake big enough to swallow a medium sized caiman is a bad idea, but doing so while it’s feeding on a medium sized caiman is probably as good a time as any, because the snake is actually rather busy. That was exciting.

The location of anaconda 2 was given away by some jacanas (big-footed water birds, similar to coots or moorhens). They were going crazy with alarm calls, hovering over a particular patch of water and looking very nervous indeed. When we looked through the weeds at the spot they were troubled by, we saw a lithe, yellow, spotted body slipping through the water. We were out of the water this time on a bridge, but one of the guides — in his enthusiasm to show people wildlife at as close quarters as possible (with just a touch of wanting to impress the laydees) — waded carefully in and grabbed the snake’s head, hauling all 2.5 m of it out on to the bridge for us to hold.

I really prefer it when people leave wild animals alone, even if that means you don’t get such a good view. Better a brief glimpse of a wild animal behaving naturally than a long look at one which would really like to go and hide in the water, thank you very much. However, there are times when you can’t get a real impression of the physicality of an animal without seeing it up close and touching it. The warm, dry skin of the snake was beautiful, and the incredible smooth power of its muscles as it gripped our hands and arms was something that just looking at it wouldn’t have conveyed. The guy put it back in the water gently, then backed away carefully. They may not rear up out of the water to attack you, but they do command a certain respect.

Our working day, while we were in Brazil, was dawn to dusk — about 5.30 am to 6 pm. We were up and out by 5.15 am, watching the light rush over the landscape, as it tends to do in the tropics (no languid, leisurely dawns there), then we headed to breakfast at about 6.30 am, feeling like we’d already accomplished something. Then there was the relatively cool, productive period until about 11 am, an agonising hour when our stomachs rumbled incessantly for lunch, followed by the flattening, oppressive heat of the early afternoon until about 3 pm. The final stretch from 3-6 pm was pleasant, gradually cooling, and with a lovely golden light cast on everything.

I mention this because I found it quite a pleasant way to work. There’s something just right about timing your working day to match the available light. You get a feeling of continuity as you watch the bats (which you saw leaving their roosts at the end of the previous day) returning from their night time foraging, and the cormorants and herons (which you saw coming back to their roosting trees the previous evening) leaving to start their day. Their activity synchronises with your activity, and after a bit of adjustment to the early start, you find that it sits very comfortably with the natural changes in your energy levels.

Of course, if you get up at 5 am, you have to go to bed at about 9 pm at the latest (though we rarely lasted past 8.30 pm), so it somewhat curtails your social life. And in temperate latitudes, your working day would oscillate wildly between unworkably short in winter, to exhaustingly long in mid-summer. Of course, this is how people used to work when their calendar was driven by the agricultural year, and artificial light was expensive and hard to come by. Explaining to your boss that you are late to work because it isn’t yet light is going to sound like the lamest of excuses now. But if I had more freedom to schedule my own day, I’d like to follow the periodicity of the natural day length more closely — I think that I’d have a lot more energy to spare.

It seems that I may have brought a little stowaway back with me from Brazil. A couple of weeks into the trip, I noticed that I had a small lump on the bottom of my left foot, between my big toe and second toe. That wasn’t very surprising, because I am — as I have said before — a mosquito magnet, and had gathered a impressive collection of bites by that time. However, this one seemed a bit different.

[Squeamish readers, please look away now.]

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I’m back. At least, I think I am. Brazil is such a huge country, and so far away from the UK that travelling from the centre of Brazil feels like an expedition in itself. I started back on Saturday, at 3pm local time, and didn’t get back to Birmingham until 1pm on Monday. There was the 20 hour bus ride, the hours of waiting at Sao Paulo airport, the 11 hour flight followed by another 1 hour 40 minute flight, and finally the taxi ride home.

Perhaps it was mostly tiredness and jet-lag, but I found that my senses got disconnected from one another. Like a group of tired children, they straggled along, getting out of synchronisation with one another. When I woke on the bus, sound roared in suddenly like a window opened on raging surf before sight and touch worked out where I was. On the flight, I realised that I had been staring at the back of the seat in front of me for several minutes after waking, seeing it, but not being aware of sound, touch or smell, or of thinking consciously about anything.

Bits of me kept getting left behind. I felt wide awake on the last part of my flight, then an intense, irresistible sleepiness ambushed me suddenly as we landed. Part of the problem, I think, is that long distance travel is done using stolen time, and there’s eventually a price to pay for that petty crime. On the plane, it’s night, but if you lift the window blinds slightly, you see fierce, shocking sunlight piling up against the glass, trying to burst the little bubble of time created by inter-continental flight. It finds you in the end.

I enjoy taking off. I like the burning roar of the engines, feeling the hand of acceleration pushing you firmly in the chest, pinning you to your seat. I like the sudden, gentle lurch as the wheels leave the ground, when you are falling and being lifted at the same time.

But it’s all disconnection, and I’m glad to be back with familiarity, slowly synchronising my senses again and re-setting my clock. I seem to be more or less all here.

Part of my plan for this year is to get rid of the car, and spend more time outdoors. Something that helps both aims (as well as saving us money and saving fossil fuels) is for me to commute to work by bike. I actually planned to start commuting in by bike last year, but my hospitalisation set that plan back a bit. Last week, I cycled in a couple of times, and I’m really enjoying it.

We’re really lucky that we’re almost on one of the National Cycle Network routes, which in turn happens to go very close to the University. So I can do almost the whole route through parks and very quiet residential streets, which makes an enormous difference to the feel of the ride. I used to like commuting in Oxford, but you did have to have your wits about you the whole time, and a healthy sense of paranoia that everyone in a car was trying to kill you, which didn’t make for a relaxing ride. Now, I can mostly glide along serenely — daydreaming, thinking about work, mentally composing blog posts — with only the need to keep half an eye out for rampaging dogs or oblivious pedestrians.

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Provided that I’ve got enough done by then, I’m planning to go to the MacExpo on Friday. I was in two minds about whether to bother, because I felt that it was a bit lacklustre last year. Now that I’m living in Birmingham, it involves a lot more time, effort and money to get to London, so I want it to be worthwhile. However, this year the show is at Olympia rather than the Design Centre in Islington as it has been in former years, so I’m hoping that they might have beefed it up a bit. I’m very keen to see the new iMacs and Aperture, as well as the new iView MediaPro, so there should be a fair amount to see.

Being a cheapskate, I found a cheap, off-peak deal with Chiltern trains, but the train comes into Marylebone, which isn’t the easiest location for getting to Olympia. I perused the Underground map, but even the most straightforward journey involved a couple of changes and a longish walk. Just as I was beginning to think that it might not be worth the hassle, I decided to look for bus timetables.

Transport for London has some really wonderfully designed bus maps and timetables. The spider maps for different areas are a really clear way to visualise how different bus routes pass through the location you’re interested in. From the map for Kensington Olympia, I could immediately see that the number 27 bus passes through both Olympia and Marylebone, and it even had an expanded view to show the detailed locations of bus stops for both directions at Olympia—-no more wondering which side of the road you should be on when you know nothing about the geography of the area.

If you search the Journey Planner, you can get detailed timetables for a particular route, centred around your chosen stop. The layout is admirably clear, with a simple line linking all the stops, and figures at each stop showing the estimated journey time from your starting point. I’ve always been put off taking buses in London because of the complication of working out which route you want and where the stops are. Now they seem to have got the information provision sorted out, but it remains to be seen whether the 27 really does come at 10-12 minute intervals as they claim, or that the journey should take about 24 minutes.

I flew back from the Pantanal; a journey which involved two taxi rides (one of an hour and one of an hour and half), two flights and three airports. The first of these was Corumbá, an elegantly faded town on the border with Bolivia. Corumbá Airport must be the smallest I’ve ever been in. It’s modern, clean and very comfortable, but absolutely tiny.

There’s almost no need for a boarding call, as there’s only one gate and the pilot can practically tap you on the shoulder personally as he picks up the keys to the plane. However, they obviously like to do things properly at Corumbá, and a someone at the gate made an announcement over the public address system, even though we were all a couple of metres from him. This professional veneer did slip a little when his walkie-talkie crackled into life during his spiel, causing screeching feedback. His expression was a picture. All the passengers started laughing (with him rather than at him), which gave him a fit of the giggles. By the time he’d got through the usual “we’ll be boarding in a few moments…” thing, everyone (including him) was laughing their heads off and he got a round of applause.

While I was waiting, I saw an older guy with ‘Baggage Handler’ written on the back of his shirt. At that point, I suspected that he was the baggage handler, singular, and felt a little guilty about the weight of my suitcase.

The Pantanal is a truly amazing place for wildlife. It should come with a health warning for biologists (or any wildlife enthusiast): “WARNING: liable to cause heart palpitations and shortness of breath”. Here are a few of my favourite wildlife encounters, and there are more photographs on my Brazil flickr set.

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This was my shower in the Pantanal, which I found it quite entertaining. The combination of bare wires, electricity, bits of casually-applied electrical tape and water had a kind of devil-may-care bravado about it, and I liked that fact that there were no nannyish notices around, warning you not to touch the heat setting lever¹ once you’d turned the water on. It felt like being treated as an adult, not an idiot. While I was there, I was musing that this kind of thing wouldn’t be allowed in the UK, where we tend to be quite scrupulous at separating water and electrical devices. Apparently, I was wrong.

We’ve had a problem for a while with a light fitting in the kitchen which is directly under the bath and shower. The bulbs keep blowing (tripping the circuit-breaker on the lighting ring main). Then this morning, all the power went out in the house, closely followed by an anguished bellow from Mr. Bsag, who was in the shower at the time. The electric shower had tripped the circuit-breaker, this time cutting all the power. I reset the circuit, but the same thing happened three times before Mr. Bsag gave up and filled the bath instead. So it seems that water is probably getting in to the electric shower unit somehow, and probably also getting in to the light fitting below in the kitchen and shorting it out.

The irony is that if we had one of the Brazilian showers, we’d be able to see what the problem was because the wires are all on display. As it is, we have to wait until an electrician can come round, and put up with the tedious process of running baths.

¹ The lever had three settings: cold, hot (actually, warm), and ‘Morna’. I never found out what morna was supposed to do.↑

We set out in the small motorboat after dark to take a look at the animals in and around the river. It’s very cool and still, and in the moonlight, eerie blue reflections of the trees are cast on the water. Our torch catches the twin red glows of caiman eyes, looking our way before quietly slipping under the surface. A family of capybara clusters near the bank, ears twitching and their long, square heads breaking the water like a collection of floating, furry shoe boxes. A herd of white brahmin cattle on the bank peers curiously at the boat, gleaming like pale ghosts. Everything is different in the dark.

Then the guide says he’s heard a jaguar, cuts the engine and turns out the torch. What a weight of silence! No cars, no aeroplanes, no human voices. Just the tiny night sounds of animals moving, breathing and hiding, and our own blood buzzing in our ears. History peels away: we are just Homo sapiens listening in the dark, not breathing, listening for the cat.

All it took was a couple of two-hour rides through the Pantanal to convince myself that I should become a cowgirl. Yes, I wanted to give up a life of science and spend my days riding the range, wearing chaps and wrasslin’ cattle—-or whatever else it is that cowboys do. I’m a little hazy on the details.

Like most pre-adolescent girls, I took horse-riding lessons when I was young, but I haven’t ridden much since then. I’ve also never ridden Western-style before, with a one-handed grip on the reins and long stirrups, but it was a lot of fun. My horse and I developed a reasonable working relationship, and broadly agreed on the direction and speed of travel, which is always a bonus. Watching wildlife from horseback is actually quite a good way to go about it. Many animals seem to see you as some kind of weird centaur-like half-human, half-horse creature, and so come a bit closer than they might if you were on foot. It’s great until one of the horses accidentally kicks a bees’ nest, as happened on one of the rides I went on.

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We had an unbelievably long journey to the Pantanal by road¹, most of which was at night. Thankfully, we had hired a very comfortable coach, with reclining seats, blankets, and all kinds of other little luxuries that made it a bit more comfortable. I sat right at the front of the bus (best seat in the house!), and watched the scenery for a while until it got dark, when I settled down to get some sleep.

In the very early hours of the morning, I woke up to see a completely empty road ahead of us, illuminated only by the twin cones of our headlights. It was absolutely straight and stretched away to a vanishing point where it dipped down, as if we were about to fall off the edge of the world. The land was flat and seemed to be almost devoid of any vegetation or habitation. The sky was flat and dark. Suddenly, lightning lit up the sky. Vivid forks etched the clouds before stabbing the earth and leaving dancing after-images in my eyes. Sheets of light rippled across the clouds, revealing the huge dome of the sky, the texture of the clouds, and the flat land below. It was like watching a stunning flicker book animation, or some scene under a strobe light. So captivating was it that I spent the next hour or so wide awake, marvelling at the light show.

¹ A journey time of 14 hours had been mentioned when we left, but in the end it took us closer to 19. ↑